About Writing

Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

Samuel R. Delany

Publication Year: 2013

Award-winning novelist Samuel R. Delany has written a book for creative writers to place alongside E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Lajos Egri's Art of Dramatic Writing. Taking up specifics (When do flashbacks work, and when should you avoid them? How do you make characters both vivid and sympathetic?) and generalities (How are novels structured? How do writers establish serious literary reputations today?), Delany also examines the condition of the contemporary creative writer and how it differs from that of the writer in the years of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the high Modernists. Like a private writing tutorial, About Writing treats each topic with clarity and insight. Here is an indispensable companion for serious writers everywhere.

Cover

Title Page, Further Reading, Copyright

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

If you are a writer, more and more you’ll find yourself writing
about writing—especially today, as creative writing classes at
the university level grow more and more common.
Writers make their critical forays in many genres: letters to
friends, private journals, interviews, articles for the public, general...

An Introduction: Emblems of Talent

In July of 1967 I waited in a ground-floor room, yellow, with
dark wainscoting and wide windows giving onto Pennsylvania
greenery. First, four holding notebooks, followed by three in
sneakers, two more with briefcases, another six in sandals and
Bermudas, then another three laughing loudly at a joke whose ...

Part I SEVEN ESSAYS

Teaching/Writing

The young painter who has set about learning to paint “realistically”
is often surprised that the eye must do the learning;
the hand more or less takes care of itself. “But I can already see
what’s there! Tell me what I’m supposed to do to set it down.”
Keep your hand still and look more closely. ...

Thickening the Plot

I distrust the term “plot” (not to mention “theme” and “setting”)
in discussions of writing: it (and they) refers to an effect a story
produces in the reading. But writing is an internal process writers
go through (or put themselves through) in front of a blank
paper that leaves a detritus of words there. The truth is, practically...

Characters

Here are two points about characterization. Both, however,
grow from a particular concept of story. A story is ultimately not
what happens in the writer’s mind that makes her or him write
down a series of words (that is the just discussed “story process”).
Rather, it is what a given series of words causes to happen ...

On Pure Storytelling

I think the trouble with writers writing about writing (or speaking
about it) is the trouble anyone has discussing his or her own
profession.
I first came across this idea in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the
Novel (1927): you’ll do better writing about something you’ve
only done a little of, because you still preserve those first impressions...

Of Doubts and Dreams

The request to write about your own work—to comment on a
collection of your own fictions, say—is, to most writers, an occasion
for distractionary tactics. What you do when you “write
a story,” like what you do when you bleed or heal, is too simple
and too complicated for the mid-level exposition most...

After Almost No Time at All the String on Which He Had Been Pulling and Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate Pieces So Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on “The Beach Fire”

I am going to be fairly tough in this story. You may find yourself
asking, “Does Q— E— really deserve this horse-whipping?”
Frankly I doubt it. Though I don’t think I’ve ever met him,
chances are he’s a pretty nice guy. Chances are he comes off
pretty bright, even in a room full of bright people. Chances are...

Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student

You write simply, we might add, so that your assumed intelligent
reader can more quickly catch you out when you write down
idiocies—and, if that reader is generous enough, so that he or
she can bracket those idiocies and go quickly to what’s interesting
among the suggestions in your work. From time to time (or...

Part II FOUR LETTERS

Letter to P—

Dear P—,
What a pleasure it was to read with you at La Taza this past
Saturday, there on Market Street in Philadelphia. The night’s
feeling was rich, informal, and literary in a way I liked. The
piece I heard you read was smart, witty, and foregrounded a political...

Letter to Q—

Dear Q—,
We are two days beyond the first snow. When, this morning,
I left my room (I think I told you, Dennis and I have been
housed in the back hall of a girls’ dorm), outside stood six rows
of bicycles, their handlebars, wheels, and seats piled and puffy,
making waist-high arches, white interlocked waves....

Letter to R—

Dear R—,
I received your letter of February 20, with the enclosed
poems, news clippings, biographical statement, photograph,
and the opening twenty pages of your novel, Time of Our Regret.
Your request for help was moving. Your basic question
seems, in effect, How does a writer go about achieving a literary...

Letter to S—

Dear S—,
Thank you for your letter.
I’ve read through the poems you sent and your story, “Dark
Finale.” It’s rather unclear from your letter what sort of response
you want. But since you’ve sent them, I must say, what first
and most strongly strikes me about the pieces is that they are...

Part III FiVE INTERViEWS

A Para•doxa Interview: Experimental Writing/Texts & Questions

Samuel R. Delany: I’d like to use your questions as an opportunity
to talk about some ideas—and some texts. The texts
come from among the alternative, or experimental, pieces I’ve
read and reread over the last forty years that have given me
much readerly pleasure. I don’t put them forward as any sort ...

An American Literary History Interview: The Situation of American Writing Today

1. No matter how strict your sense of career as an individual
endeavor, do you also find that your writing reveals a connection
to any group—political, religious, cultural, national, international,
racial, class, gender, sexual, or other? Do you see your...

A Poetry Project Newsletter Interview: A Silent Interview

Samuel R. Delany: I can’t believe you’re really frivolous enough
to think that, because I’m a science fiction writer, I have some
privileged, informed, or even interesting take on the future,
more than do ditch diggers, dry cleaners, insurance salesmen
—or, indeed, the run-of-the-mill poet or novelist. The only ...

A Black Clock Interview

Samuel R. Delany: I read both. I was an avid science-fiction
reader. I read it morning, noon, and night. But I read everything
morning, noon, and night. I read lots of literature. And I read
lots of science fiction. Paradoxically, the most emotional things
that happened to me as a reader tended to come from the science...

A Para•doxa Interview: Inside and Outside the Canon

Samuel R. Delany: The Oxford English Dictionary devotes two
and a quarter columns to some fourteen definitions of the word
—from “canon” as rule (from the Greek jamx´ m), through
“canon” as “a standard of judgment or authority; a test, a criterion,
a means of discrimination,” through “canon law,” the biblical...

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